[Living--isn't it?--is very dangerous. Because one still doesn't know. Because learning to live is what living is, just that. The sertão produced me, then it swallowed me, then it spit me out from the heat of its mouth.... Do you believe my account?]

(Gran Sertón: Veredas, 583)﻿

﻿

For all the talk about its linguistic innovations, its storytelling audacity, and its focus on Brazilian orality, one of the many ironies about João Guimarães Rosa's engrossing, enigmatic, epic Gran Sertón: Veredas [original title: Grande Sertão: Veredas; colorful but misguided English title: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands] is that this landmark work of 20th century South American modernism is at least in part a medieval European romance updated and translated to the sertão or backlands region of 19th century Brazil. In terms of genre at least, it's a wild and woolly throwback of sorts in spite of its contradictory and sometimes thorny modern trimmings. Delivered in the form of a sprawling, nearly 600 page long expanding universe of a monologue uninterrupted by chapter breaks or anything else for that matter, Gran Sertón finds the indefatigable Riobaldo, an elderly former yagunzo [Portuguese: jagunço] or mercenary for hire, tirelessly crisscrossing the veredas or pathways of both back country Brazil and his own mind--narrating his life story to an unnamed listener, revisiting the days when he attempted to make sense of good and evil in the violent times before the city and modern politics took sway. What was life like back in those distant days? As the semi-literate Riobaldo describes it, the great or grand sertón [Portuguese: sertão] in Minas Gerais and the neighboring states was a sort of lawless, unlettered Dantean heaven and hell dominated by folk religion, a rotating cast of almost mythical outlaws, ubiquitous misery, and the proposition that might makes right--clearly more Inferno than Paradiso then. Two examples from early on should suffice to give you a good idea of this. In the first, a meanspirited man named Alejo kills an elderly itinerant alms seeker "sólo por gracia rústica" ["just for country kicks"]. When the killer's four innocent children later catch the measles and go blind, Alejo takes this as a punishment from on high and drastically changes his ways, "sudando para ser bueno y caritativo en todas sus horas de la noche y del día" ["sweating to be good and charitable in all his hours night and day"] (28). In the second, some of Riobaldo's companions are forced to kill an enormous monkey in order to have something to live off of during a time of famine. After carving up the animal and eating some of it despite noticing that it didn't have a tail, the men then discover that it was actually a wild man named José dos Alves, who was accustomed to roaming through the woods naked after having lost his mind and for lack of clothes. The man's mother, weeping over the loss of her "criatura de Dios" ["child of God"], tries to exact revenge on the starving men by directing them to a poisonous yucca grove for their next meal (68-69). Farfetched? Perhaps. But it's the kind of folklore-like anecdote that bolsters a comment that's made later on: "¡Cada hora de cada día, uno aprende una nueva clase de miedo!" ["Each hour of each day, one learns a new kind of fear!"] (100). Although our narrator can boastfully joke that only the strong can survive in the great backlands of the novel's title--"Usted lo sabe: el sertón es donde manda quien es fuerte, con las astucias. ¡Dios mismo cuando venga, que venga armado!" ["You know it: the sertão is where the one who calls the shots is the strong man, the cunning man. When God himself comes, he better come armed!"] (34)--it's precisely this unromanticized landscape of bandits, lepers, purveyors of witchcraft, and snakebite victims where the struggles between rival jagunço warlords take place, where Riobaldo falls in love with a maiden named Otacilia and another jagunço named Diadorín, and where Riobaldo, suffering from malaria and before eventually becoming a jagunço leader himself, will attempt to sell his soul to the devil in order to defeat a rival jagunço leader named Hermógenes. Who the real devil is isn't entirely clear, but the devil's existence--and man's relation to God--are questions Riobaldo returns to again and again: "Pecados, vagancia de pecados" ["Sins, vagrancy of sins"], he confesses at one point. "Pero, ¿estábamos nosotros con Dios? ¿Podia un yagunzo? Un yagunzo: criatura pagada para crímenes, imponiendo el sufrir en el quieto orden de los otros, matando y rapiñando" ["But, were we with God? Could a yagunzo be with God? A yagunzo: a being paid for crimes, imposing suffering on the quiet order of others, killing and stealing"] (230). Questions without answers or at least answers that can't be trusted set down on epic vellum (Joca Ramiro is referred to as a "par de Francia" ["peer of France"], Riobaldo tells somebody he's not like the Carolingian Guy of Burgundy, and there's a three-page sequence in which jagunço names are recorded like the Homeric catalogue of ships in the Iliad Book II) and all encased in an riddle that begins with the being and nothingness translation neologism "Nonada" ("No es nada" or "No nothing" or "It's nothing") and ends with--kabbalistically?--the infinity sign. In other words, a big fat book that's just begging for a reread.

["And in this, which I'm telling you, the sertão of the world is seen. Let God exist, yes, slowly, quickly. He exists, but almost only by means of people's actions: of the good ones and the bad ones. Immense things of the world. The great-sertão is the powerful weapon. Is God a trigger?"]

lunes, 27 de mayo de 2013

Have you ever come back from the dead? If not, it may be difficult for you to understand why the tormented title character of Balzac's 1832 novellamight have been better off succumbing to his horrific wounds at the battle of Eylau, where he was left for dead and buried in a common grave, and it will most certainly be difficult for me to explain why this account of Colonel Chabert's legal proceedings to restore his name and fortune after years of recovering from his near death experience on the battlefield hits like such a ton of bricks. In any event, I don't expect that I'll be giving away too much by mentioning that the colonel's renewed relationship with his former wife--who has remarried and is now a mother to a political opportunist's young children--is at the heart of this sobering meditation on an Empire era man of honor's pursuit of justice in Restoration days. Three things, in particular, make this a standout as a reading experience. First, there's the deliciously creepy way the poor protagonist is described as the bearer of a "physionomie cadavéreuse" ["cadaverous aspect"] (70), is forced to explain which Colonel Chabert he is to the lawyer Derville ("--Celui qui est mort à Eylau, répondit le vieillard" ["'The one who died at Eylau,' responded the old man"]) (72), and is even referred to as a dead man talking by the narrator ("--Monsieur, dit le défunt, peut-être savez-vous que je commandais un régiment de cavalerie à Eylau" ["'Monsieur,' said the deceased, 'perhaps you know that I commanded a cavalry regiment at Eylau'"]) (73). Then there's the just plain creepy way Colonel Chabert recalls being buried alive among the dead in 1807 before he regained consciousness and found new life among the living: "Le peu d'air que je respirait était méphitique...J'entendis, ou crus entendre, je ne veux rien affirmer, des gémissements poussés par le monde de cadavres au milieu duquel je gisais" ["The scant amount of air that I was breathing was noxious...I heard, or thought I heard, I don't wish to swear on oath to anything, some groans uttered by the world of cadavers in the midst of which I was lying"] (75, ellipses added). Finally, you have to love the way indignation is the order of the day in Balzac's brisk, bracing telling of a story in which a Grande Armée survivor is brought low by the machinations of a lying woman--and a legal system which is all too willing to accept him as an impostor. On that note, here's a quick portrait of monsieur Derville, the one lawyer who is willing to help Colonel Chabert if the old soldier will only allow himself to be helped: "Un sourire malicieux et mordant exprima les idées moitié philosophiques, moitié railleuses qui devaient venir à un homme si bien placé pour connaître le fond des choses, malgré les mensonges sous lesquels la plupart des familles parisiennes cachent leur existence" ["A malicious and mordant smile expressed the half philosophical, half scoffing ideas which were beginning to come to a man so well placed to discern the innermost recesses of things in spite of the lies behind which the majority of Parisian families hide their existence"] (110). A narrative knuckle sandwich.

domingo, 19 de mayo de 2013

Even though Gogol's sly, playful sense of humor probably seems pretty tame--well, perhaps "gentle" is a better word for it--after three posts in a row dedicated to "apocalyptic satirist" Karl Kraus last week, I thought it might be fun to spend some extended time with Chapter Eight of Dead Souls to check out the variety of comedic junk in the trunk to be found in the novel. This chapter is, of course, largely concerned with the elaborately chronicled hijinks where the scoundrel Chichikov goes girl crazy and then suffers an ignominious one-man rise and fall at the Governor's ball. However, Chichikov's player status isn't the only target of the narrative's, ahem, broad humor. While initially claiming that he's too "timid" as regards the ladies "to describe in vivid colors, so to speak, their qualities of soul" (158), the author eventually relents and begins to paint with what he claims is his limited palette a portrait of the people of the provincial town of N. The women, he writes, "surpassed even the ladies of Petersburg and Moscow" in matters of etiquette: "The visiting card, even if written on a deuce of clubs or ace of diamonds, was a very sacred thing" (159). Duels between their husbands "of course, did not take place between them, because they were all civil servants"; instead, "they tried to do each other dirt wherever possible, which, as everyone knows, can sometimes be worse than any duel" (ibid.). Finally, the level of civility was such that "the ladies of the town of N. were distinguished, like many Petersburg ladies, by an extraordinary prudence and propriety in their words and expressions." Gogol explains it like this: "Never would they say: 'I blew my nose,' 'I sweated,' 'I spat,' but rather: 'I relieved my nose' or 'I resorted to my handkerchief.'" And even better, like this: "It was in no case possible to say: 'This glass or this plate stinks.' And it was even impossible to say anything that hinted at it, but instead they would say: 'This glass is being naughty,' or something of the sort" (160).

"This glass is being naughty," while deserving of a YouTube gone viral moment in its own right as part of this chapter's send-up of the novel of manners, ought not distract us from the way Dead Souls repeatedly links putting on airs with a literary representation of highbrow "Russian-ness" for comedic effect. You'll note, for example, that it's amid scenes like this where, at the Governor's ball and suddenly receiving an undue amount of attention from the women of the town now that he's temporarily suspected of being a millionaire bachelor, Chichikov stops to reflect on the "moist, velvety, sugary [and] God knows whatnot else!" lustre of the female sex (165)--and, giving up, finally mutters to himself that women are "the cockety half of mankind, and nothing else!" Gogol, perhaps chivalrously, intervenes at this point (166):

Beg pardon! It seems a little word picked up in the street just flew out of our hero's mouth. No help for it! Such is the writer's position in Russia! Anyway, if a word from the street has got into a book, it is not the writer's fault, the fault is with the readers, high-society readers most of all: they are the first not to use a single decent Russian word, but French, German, and English they gladly dispense in greater quantity than one might wish, and dispense even preserving all possible pronunciations: French through the nose and with a burr, English they pronounce in the manner of a bird, and even assume a bird's physiognomy, and they will even laugh at anyone who cannot assume a bird's physiognomy; and they will only not dispense anything Russian, unless perhaps out of patriotism they build themselves a Russian-style cottage as a country house. Such are readers of the highest ranks, and along with them all those who count themselves among the higher ranks! And yet what exactingness! They absolutely insist that everything be written in the most strict, purified, and noble of tongues--in short, they want the Russian tongue suddenly to descend from the clouds on its own, all properly finished, and settle right on their tongue, leaving them nothing to do but gape their mouths open and stick it out. Of course, the female half of mankind is a puzzle; but our worthy readers, it must be confessed, are even more of a puzzle.

Although Chichikov's poor choice of words--the so-called word from the street ("cockety") that Gogol apparently fabricated in Russian just as translators Pevear and Volokhonsky have in converting it into English nearly 150 years later--is clearly just a pretext for the author to take his "worthy readers" to task for the crimes he accuses them of, it's particularly ironic within the context of the novel as a whole that he chides not only "readers of the highest ranks" but "along with them all those who count themselves among the higher ranks!" As readers, is there a Chichikovian poseur in each of us? Also, it's a pleasure to behold the author's subversive streak regarding language matters: the Russian of the elite and the literary language that "high-society readers" supposedly want most of all comes in any language but Russian according to the complaint; and yet, the novel's would-be real spoken Russian, "a little word picked up in the street," is coarse and/or an invention at best. What's a pompous language patriot to do?

Whatever the answer to that question, Gogol continues turning up the heat on Chichikov and the mannered party scenes of the modern novel on the very next page. First we learn that "Chichikov was so taken up by his conversations with the ladies--or, better, the ladies so took him up and whirled him around with their conversations, adding a heap of the most fanciful and subtle allegories, which all had to be penetrated, even making sweat stand out on his brow--that he forgot to fulfill his duty to propriety and go up to the hostess first of all" (167). Then we learn that the author himself, failing to live up to the genre requirements demanded by the moment, cannot accurately transmit the conversation that took place next (such is his discomfiture that one almost imagines sweat standing out on his brow as well):

I cannot convey the lady's words exactly, something was said full of great courtesy, in the spirit in which ladies and gentlemen express themselves in the novellas of our society writers, who love to describe drawing rooms and boast of their knowledge of high tone, in the spirit of: "Can it be that your heart is so possessed that there is no longer any room, not even the tiniest corner, for those whom you have mercilessly forgotten?" Our hero turned to the governor's wife that same instant and was ready to deliver his reply, probably in no way inferior to those delivered in fashionable novels by the Zvonskys, the Linskys, the Lidins, the Gremins, and various other adroit military men, when, chancing to raise his eyes, he stopped suddenly, as if stunned by a blow (167).

The cause of the blow-like blow received by Chichikov? Cherchez la femme Nikita:

Before him stood not only the governor's wife: on her arm she had a young girl of sixteen, a fresh blonde with fine and trim features, a sharp chin, a charmingly rounded face, the sort an artist would choose as a model for a Madonna, a sort rarely occurring in Russia, where everything likes to be on a vast scale, whatever there is--mountains and forests and steppes, and faces and lips and feet; the same blonde he had met on the road, leaving Nozdryov's, when, owing to the stupidity either of the coachmen or of the horses, their carriages had so strangely collided, entangling their harnesses, and Uncle Mityai and Uncle Minyai had set about disentangling the affair. Chichikov was so abashed that he was unable to utter a single sensible word and mumbled devil knows what, something no Gremin or Zvonsky or Lidin would ever have said (167-168).

Regrouping after being momentarily tongue-tied, the understandably smitten Chichikov recovers enough of his ineffectual party patter to elicit a stifled yawn out of his would-be love interest. Later, an even worse disaster befalls him and the party deteriorates to the point where "officers, ladies, tailcoats--everything became courteous, even to the point of cloying" and "one colonel offered a dish of sauce to a lady on the tip of his bare sword" (175). Back in his room afterward, like a man who has attended a party he didn't want to go to and knew he wouldn't enjoy, Chichikov rails against the idiocy of balls before concluding with an unexpected question: "So, what can possibly be squeezed out of this ball? So, what if some writer, say, decided to describe the whole scene as it is? So, then in the book it would come out just as witless as in nature. What is it--moral? immoral? It's simply devil-knows-what! You'd spit and close the book" (176).

Spitting and closing the book aside, Chichikov's four questions about the ball probably provide as fine an example as any of how Gogol's often earthy humor frequently returns to what readers should expect out of his novel/epic "poem" in prose. Gogol provokes his readers almost as often as he picks on poor Chichikov or uses exclamation points to punctuate his sentences. It's all in good fun, but the authorial intent is probably just as aesthetically pleasing as Kraus' was minus the eschatological baggage of course. Given that I've probably said too much already, I'll get out of the way and let Gogol or "the author" have the last word. The rant that follows is from Chapter Eleven, pages 228-229:﻿

﻿

It is highly doubtful that readers will like the hero we have chosen. The ladies will not like him, that can be said positively, for the ladies demand that a hero be a decided perfection, and if there is any little spot on his soul or body, it means trouble! However deeply the author peers into his soul, reflecting his image more purely than a mirror, it will be to no avail. The very plumpness and middle age of Chichikov will do him great harm: plumpness will in no way be forgiven a hero, and a great many ladies will turn away, saying: "Fie, ugly thing!" Alas! all this is known to the author, yet for all that he cannot take a virtuous man as his hero, but...perhaps in this same story some other, as yet untouched strings will be felt, the inestimabale wealth of the Russian spirit will step forth, a man endowed with divine valor will pass by, or some wondrous Russian maiden such as can be found nowhere in the world, with all the marvelous beauty of a woman's soul, all magnanimous aspiration and self-denial. And all virtuous people of other tribes will seem dead next to them, as a book is dead next to the living word! Russian movements will arise...and it will be seen how deeply that which has only grazed the nature of other peoples has sunk into the Slavic nature... But wherefore and why speak of what lies ahead? It is unbecoming for the author, a man long since taught by a stern inner life and the refreshing sobriety of solitude, to forget himself like a youth. Everything in its turn, its place, its time! But all the same the virtuous man has not been taken as a hero. And it is even possible to say why he has not been taken. Because it is time finally to give the poor virtuous man a rest, because the phrase "virtuous man" idly circulates on all lips; because the virtuous man has been turned into a horse, and there is no writer who has not driven him, urging him on with a whip and whatever else is handy; because the virtuous man has been so worn out that there is not even the ghost of any virtue left in him, but only skin and ribs instead of a body; because the virtuous man is invoked hypocritically; because the virtuous man is not respected! No, it is time finally to hitch up a scoundrel. And so, let us hitch up a scoundrel.

miércoles, 15 de mayo de 2013

"Karl Kraus"
by Walter Benjamin [translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott]
Germany, 1931

"Monster [Unmensch]," to my mind the least linguistically explosive of the three sub-sections in Benjamin's study on Karl Kraus although of course only relatively speaking at that, still begins with a typical Benjamin bombshell in which he compares "the genuine satirist" Kraus with "the scribblers who make a trade of mockery and who, in their invectives, have little more in mind than giving the public something to laugh about" (378). What makes a true satirist like Kraus stand out from this pack of lightweight jokers?

In contrast, the great type of the satirist never had firmer ground under his feet than amid a generation about to mount tanks and put on gas masks, a mankind that has run out of tears but not of laughter. In him civilization prepares to survive, if it must, and communicates with him in the true mystery of satire, which consists in the devouring of the adversary. The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization. His recollection of his origin is not without filial piety, so that the proposal to eat people has become an essential constituent of his inspiration, from Jonathan Swift's pertinent project concerning the use of the children of the less wealthy classes, to Léon Bloy's suggestion that landlords of insolvent lodgers be conceded a right to the sale of the lodgers' flesh. In such directives, great satirists have taken the measure of the humanity of their fellow men. "Humanity, culture, and freedom are precious things that cannot be bought dearly enough with blood, understanding, and human dignity"--thus Kraus concludes the dispute between the cannibal and human rights. One should compare his formulation with Marx's treatment of the "Jewish question," in order to judge how totally this playful reaction of 1909--the reaction against the classical ideal of humanity--was likely to become a confession of materialist humanism at the first opportunity. Admittedly, one would need to understand Die Fackel from the first number on, literally word for word, to predict that this aesthetically oriented journalism, without sacrificing or gaining a single motif, was destined to become the political prose of 1930. For this it had to thank its partner, the press, which disposed of humanity in the way to which Kraus alludes in these words: "Human rights are the fragile toy that grownups like to trample on and so will not give up" (ibid.).

From this beginning on genre matters, Benjamin traces the satirist's career arc through operettas (Benjamin: "Just as prattle seals the enslavement of language through stupidity, so operetta transfigures stupidity through music" [379]), through his public readings, through his "hate poems" (383) and finally back to his polemics--all making me wish I knew more about Kraus than I do. Perhaps Benjamin felt the same for, despite a poetic summation at the end in which he seeks to portray the protean "monster" Kraus as the archetypal angel of "a humanity that proves itself by destruction" (387), it's this earlier quote on our corrosive hero's "combative aspect" that ironically feels like the most revealing R.I.P. to me: "No one can grasp the necessity that compelled this great bourgeois character to become a comedian, this guardian of Goethean linguistic values a polemicist, or why this irreproachably honest man went berserk" (386).﻿

Source

As previously noted, "Karl Kraus" appears on pp. 361-390 of the Walter Benjamin anthology, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).﻿

martes, 14 de mayo de 2013

"Karl Kraus"
by Walter Benjamin [translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott]
Germany, 1931
﻿
As quotable as Benjamin is throughout his wide-ranging essay on Kraus, it's in the middle section, "Demon," where you really begin to appreciate his profundity and his artistry as a critic. Benjamin doesn't see Kraus as a polemicist who is drawn to pontificating about evil in order to perform some greater good for the rest of us. In fact, he scoffs at the idea of Kraus as an "ethical personality" at all: "The dark background from which Kraus's image detaches itself," Benjamin writes, "is not formed by his contemporaries, but is the primeval world [Vorwelt], or the world of the demon" (370). Kraus' vanity, "his unconquerable need to be perceived" is undeniable according to the critic. But to what end? Benjamin sees it as arising from a complex interplay of "self-expression" and "self-unmasking" in which, perhaps unwittingly at times, Kraus offers up his own life as a performative "sacrifice to his vanity" (370-371). Benjamin: "Idiosyncrasy as the highest critical organ--this is the hidden logic of that self reflection and the hellish state known only to a writer for whom every act of gratification becomes at the same time a station of his martyrdom, a state experienced, apart from Kraus, by no one as deeply as by Kierkegaard." Kraus, quoted by Benjamin: "I am perhaps the first instance of a writer who simultaneously writes and experiences his writing theatrically" (371).

Kraus' "mimetic genius, imitating while it glosses, pulling faces in the midst of polemics," inspires some of Benjamin's finest, most penetrating writing about "the demon in the man" that is Kraus (371). You don't, I hope you'll agree, even need to know anything about Kraus to appreciate an arresting description like this:

[Kraus] imitates his subjects in order to insert the crowbar of his hate into the finest joints of their posture. This quibbler, probing between syllables, digs out the larvae that nest there in clumps. The larvae of venality and garrulity, ignominy and bonhomie, childishness and covetousness, gluttony and dishonesty. Indeed, the exposure of inauthenticity--more difficult than that of the merely bad--is here performed behavioristically. The quotations in Die Fackel are more than documentary proof: they are the props with which the quoter unmasks himself mimetically. Admittedly, what emerges in just this connection is how closely the cruelty of the satirist is linked to the ambiguous modesty of the interpreter, which in his public readings is heightened beyond comprehension. "To creep"--this is the term used, not without cause, for the lowest kind of flattery; and Kraus creeps into those he impersonates, in order to annihilate them. Has courtesy here become the mimicry of hate, hate the mimicry of courtesy? However that may be, both have attained perfection, absolute pitch. "Torment," of which there is so much talk in Kraus in such opaque allusions, here has its seat. His protests against letters, printed matter, documents are nothing but the defensive reaction of a man who is himself implicated. But what implicates him so deeply is more than deeds and misdeeds; it is the language of his fellow men. His passion for imitating them is at the same time the expression of and the struggle against this implication, and also the cause and the result of that ever-watchful guilty conscience in which alone the demon is his element (371-372).

It would be easy enough to stop at this point given how much Benjamin has already shed light on the slippery Kraus, but he isn't done trashing the explanations of the Kraus fans who posit "compassion" as one of the hidden wellsprings of the Austrian's art:

No! This incorruptible, piercing, resolute assurance does not spring from the noble poetic or humane disposition that his followers are so fond of attributing to him. How utterly banal, and at the same time how fundamentally wrong, is their derivation of his hatred from love, when it is obvious how much more elemental are the forces here at work: a humanity that is only an alternation of malice and sophistry, sophistry and malice, a nature that is the highest school of aversion to mankind and a pity that is alive only when interlaced with vengeance (372).

Is Benjamin's a partisan study? You be the judge. Citing Brecht's great quote about Kraus, "When the age laid hands upon itself, he was the hands" (372), Benjamin then moves on from Kraus' primal desire for vengeance to his apocalyptic vision of justice. Whatever you make of the argument, the language itself is impeccable, insistent: "Nothing is understood about this man until it has been perceived that, of necessity and without exception, everything--language and fact--falls, for him, within the sphere of justice. All his fire-eating, sword-swallowing philology in the newspapers pursues justice just as much as language" (373). But where does this sense of justice originate from other than from within the demon himself? One of Benjamin's answers may surprise you for it's none other than Baudelaire whom he sees as one of Kraus' spiritual ancestors:

Only Baudelaire hated, as Kraus did, the satiety of healthy common sense, and the compromise that intellectuals made with it in order to find shelter in journalism. Journalism is betrayal of the literary life, of mind, of the demon. Idle chatter is its true substance, and every feuilleton poses anew the insoluble question of the relationship between the forces of stupidity and malice, whose expression is gossip. It is, fundamentally, on the complete agreement of two forms of existence--life under the aegis of mere mind, and life under the aegis of mere sexuality--that the solidarity of the man of letters with the whore is founded, a solidarity to which Baudelaire's existence is once again the most inviolable testimony (376).

Benjamin concludes this part of his work with a somewhat complicated--and perhaps not altogether convincing--argument linking Kraus' hatred of the press with his defense of prostitution, the commoditization of words and the commoditization of the flesh (a Kraus flashback: "Penury can turn every man into a journalist, but not every woman into a prostitute" [375]). Although I'm not sure I buy all of it, I have to admit that Benjamin's musings on sexuality and the mind as it possibly pertains to Kraus did permit one final sneak attack that sort of waylaid me. The subject? An evocation of Kraus' nights which, perhaps on account of its lack of romanticism about the tortured artist, speaks to me more than it otherwise should: "His night, however, is not a maternal night, or a moonlit, romantic night: it is the hour between sleeping and waking, the night watch, the centerpiece of his threefold solitude: that of the coffeehouse, where he is alone with his enemy; of the nocturnal room, where he is alone with his demon; of the lecture hall, where he is alone with his work" (377).

Source

"Karl Kraus." In Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, 361-390).﻿

lunes, 13 de mayo de 2013

"Karl Kraus"
by Walter Benjamin [translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott]
Germany, 1931

Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay on Karl Kraus and his Viennese newspaper Die Fackel, conveniently divided into the sections "1. Cosmic Man [Allmensch]," "2. Demon" and "3. Monster [Unmensch]" and all introduced by a Kraus epigraph, is almost as much fun to read as Kraus himself. Although I hope to return to the second and third parts of the essay later in the week (the thing's just too rich to try and cover in one post), here's the German critic's attention-grabbing beginning:

In old engravings, there is a messenger who rushes toward us crying aloud, his hair on end, brandishing a sheet of paper in his hands--a sheet full of war and pestilence, of cries of murder and pain, of danger from fire and flood--spreading everywhere the Latest News. "News" in this sense, in the sense that the word has in Shakespeare, is disseminated by Die Fackel [The Torch]. Full of betrayal, earthquakes, poison, and fire from the mundus intelligibilis. The hatred with which it pursues the tribe of journalists that swarms into infinity is not only a moral hatred but a vital one, such as is hurled by an ancestor upon a race of degenerate and dwarfish rascals that has sprung from his seed. The very term "public opinion" outrages Kraus (361).

While you'd think it'd be hard to maintain the intensity level of that opening, Benjamin shifts from this "visual" introduction of Kraus to a descriptive appraisal of Kraus' motivations without any appreciable loss of adrenaline. After calmly stating that the empty phrase is Kraus' enemy, "the unmasking of the inauthentic" is the source of his hatred of the press (362-363), Benjamin launches into a feverish appreciation of Die Fackel's role in the combat:

The intertwining of biblical magniloquence with stiff-necked fixation on the indecencies of Viennese life--this is its way of approaching phenomena. It is not content to call on the world as witness to the misdemeanors of a cashier; it must summon the dead from their graves. --Rightly so. For the shabby, obtrusive abundance of these scandals in Viennese coffeehouses, the press, and society is only a minor manifestation of a foreknowledge that then, more swiftly than anyone could perceive, suddenly arrived at its true and original subject: two months after the outbreak of war, Kraus called this subject by name in his speech "In These Great Times," with which all the demons that inhabited this possessed man passed into the herd of swine who were his contemporaries (363-364).

Although I'd already want to read more about Kraus (and read more by Benjamin) from that last line of Benjamin's alone, the essayist inserts a head-spinning excerpt from "In These Great Times" (the mercurial Kraus: "Let him who has something to say step forward and be silent!") before adding:

Everything Kraus wrote is like that: a silence turned inside out, a silence that catches the storm of events in its black folds and billows, its livid lining turned outward...the polemical possibilities of every situation are totally exhausted. With what precautions this is surrounded can be seen from the barbed wire of editorial pronouncements that encircles each edition of Die Fackel, as from the razor-sharp definitions and provisos in the programs and lectures accompanying his readings from his own work. The trinity of silence, knowledge and alertness constitutes the figure of Kraus the polemicist (364-365, ellipses added).

Those of you who know how Kraus ended his career will understand why Benjamin was startlingly prescient about the Austrian polemicist here. Those of you who know how Benjamin ended his career may well wonder whether the writing was already on the wall for both of these men.

Source

"Karl Kraus" appears on pp. 361-390 of the Walter Benjamin anthology, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008). Walter Benjamin photo above: photographer unknown.﻿

domingo, 12 de mayo de 2013

Having been at least twenty-five years since I last drove my "rather handsome, smallish spring britzka" (3) with the California license plates through the comedic nooks and crannies of Nikolai Gogol's eternally youthful 33-year old mind, I arrive here today finally ready to tell you all that Volume One of Dead Souls was just about as funny as I'd remembered it. Unfortunately, the incomplete Volume Two was just as "memorable" as ever as well--I didn't really remember anything from it from the first time around, but that's understandable now that I see that it's written in a way that makes you wonder how the uproarious novelist with the 1967 Love Forever Changes haircut suddenly became "unfunny" between volumes one and two. That lone literary/hair coiffing complaint aside, I'm certainly sorry it took so long for me to ever get around to rereading Gogol's novel/"poema." Ostensibly a novel-length tale about the antihero Chichikov's con man-like attempts to buy himself into a new tax bracket by purchasing "dead souls" to fraudulently populate a would-be nobleman's estate in provincial Russia, Dead Souls is--genre matters notwithstanding--really just a superb specimen of a Siglo de Oro-style picaresque novella metafictionally updated and transplanted to early 19th century Russia and including an unreliable narrator just as roguish as its putative protagonist. Before any of y'all Gogol fanboys get too mad at me over that "just," here's a solid single paragraph hand-picked to give others an idea of why I'd happily recommend this work to virtually anyone:

Happy the writer who, passing by characters that are boring, disgusting, shocking in their mournful reality, approaches characters that manifest the lofty dignity of man, who from the great pool of daily whirling images has chosen only the rare exceptions, who has never once betrayed the exalted tuning of his lyre, nor descended from his height to his poor, insignificant brethren, and, without touching the ground, has given the whole of himself to his elevated images so far removed from it. Twice enviable is his beautiful lot: he is among them as in his own family; and meanwhile his fame spreads loud and far. With entrancing smoke, he has clouded people's eyes; he has flattered them wondrously, concealing what is mournful in life, showing them a beautiful man. Everything rushes after him, applauding, and flies off following his triumphal chariot. Great world poet they name him, soaring high above all other geniuses in the world, as the eagle soars above other high fliers. At the mere mention of his name, young ardent hearts are filled with trembling, responsive tears shine in all eyes... No one equals him in power--he is God! But such is not the lot, and other is the destiny of the writer who has dared to call forth all that is before our eyes every moment and which our indifferent eyes do not see--all the terrible, stupendous mire of trivia in which our life is entangled, the whole depth of cold, fragmented, everyday characters that swarm over our often bitter and boring earthly path, and with the firm strength of his implacable chisel dares to present them roundly and vividly before the eyes of all people! It is not for him to win people's applause, not for him to behold the grateful tears and unanimous rapture of the souls he has stirred; no sixteen-year-old girl will come flying to meet him with her head in a whirl and heroic enthusiasm; it is not for him to forget himself in the sweet enchantment of sounds he has evoked; it is not for him, finally, to escape contemporary judgment, hypocritically callous contemporary judgment, which will call insignificant and mean the creations he has fostered, will allot him a contemptible corner in the ranks of writers who insult mankind, will ascribe to him the qualities of the heroes he has portrayed, will deny him heart, and soul, and the divine flame of talent. For contemporary judgment does not recognize that equally wondrous are the glasses that observe the sun and look at the movement of inconspicuous insects; for contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation; for contemporary judgment does not recognize that lofty ecstatic laughter is worthy to stand beside the lofty lyrical impulse, and that a whole abyss separates it from the antics of the street-fair clown! This contemporary judgment does not recognize; and will turn it all into a reproach and abuse of the unrecognized writer; with no sharing, no response, no sympathy, like a familyless wayfarer, he will be left alone in the middle of the road. Grim is his path, and bitterly will he feel his solitude (133-134).

Although Gogol doesn't need any seconds in what's obviously at least in part a Man vs. Cliché duel that's going on here in this discussion of the writer's métier, it'll help you to better appreciate one of the finer offscreen aspects of his wit if I mention that this paragraph follows a preceding one in which the money-hungry, social climber Chichikov is said to be "in the merriest spirits." Gogol then compares his creation to a dreamy 20-year old with romantic visions of Spain who "is in heaven and has come calling on Schiller" before reality returns and "lands him back on earth, and even on Haymarket Square, and even near a pot-house, and workaday life again goes strutting before him" (131-132). From here, it's but a short, unencumbered stroll to the duel assignation spot in the paragraph above from whence, mockingly employing both rhetorical topoi and language like a kinder, gentler version of the Comte de Lautréamont, Gogol humorously takes aim at contemporary writers and readers for only wanting to indulge in an altered version of reality--and a hypocritically sanitized one at that. It's all pretty lighthearted as far as reproaches go, but wait, did the author really just call readers the "poor, insignificant brethren" of one type of writer and then insultingly compare human life to "the movement of inconspicuous insects" under his own writer's glass? More on Dead Souls later in the week if, for nothing else, the chance to share a couple of other extended paragraph highlights with you. To tide you over until then, here's a semi-random example of Gogol's mastery of the shorter, punchier, less-cerebral sentence format: "The party ended, as usual, with a fight" (196).﻿

martes, 7 de mayo de 2013

"And who might you be?" asked the old man, folding his respectful face for an attentive expression. "Are you a swindler...or simply a bourgeois boss?"

"I'm...I'm from the proletariat," reluctantly announced Chiklin.

"Aha--today's tsar! In that case, I'll wait for you."

(The Foundation Pit, 47)﻿

I finished The Foundation Pit--named after the novel's not so subtle symbolic fictional foundation pit for a future, indestructible, all-proletarian, and never to be completed workers' dwelling that just might double for the Soviet Socialist Republic's grave--a few weeks back and liked it well enough despite its occasional heavyhandedness, I suppose. However, it's really too bad that the novel's had to follow on the heels of Karl Kraus Week in the reviewing queue because not everybody can do disgruntled political satire and social commentary quite like Herr Kraus can. Nein! In any event, a reviewer from The Irish Times hasI think rightly pegged Platonov's book, begun in the late 1920s but not published as a complete text until 1994, as an "absurdist parable." Ditto for translators Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson, who in their afterword to the novel describe the work as "a philosophical fable" but one in which "the world [that] Platonov evokes...is a hell where both language and labor have lost their meaning, where nearly every character is alienated from his own self, and where acts of violence are seen by both perpetrators and victims as the most normal thing in the world" (157-158). Assuming you like absurdist philosophical fables much more than I do, this all sounds great and sometimes is. Those not so fond of absurdist poli sci schtick may well be bored at times, though. Since Platonov probably amused me a little more often than he frustrated me, I'll try to stay positive here. What I liked best about the work is the way it brings the recently fired/"made redundant" factory worker Vohschev (1) into contact with a cross-section of Soviet society at the height of the collectivization efforts and the terror famine--what Chandler and Meerson refer to as "among the greatest--but also the least acknowledged--catastrophes of Soviet history" (153). This historic backdrop lends gravitas to what's occasionally some less than riveting storytelling, but on the other hand Platonov must have done something right to eventually make me feel sympathy for the orphan girl Nastya who is introduced announcing "kill the kulaks" and things of that nature. What did I like least about the work? Well, I guess I'm just not all that into the absurdist political humor scene, comrade. Nyet. Also, there's nothing raw or visceral about the writing here unlike what you'd find in an alienation-fixated contemporary like Arlt or Broch: Platonov's daring is all about his themes, not his rather spaced out language. One possible exception--Nastya, rejoicing that a big black bear "was on our side and not on the bourgeoisie's," asks a memorable question on page 108: "He suffers too...so that means he's for Stalin, doesn't it?"

Andrey Platonov (1899-1951)

I read The Foundation Pit as 1/2 of a two-man group read with Dwight from A Common Reader--hope that he will have a response of his own to the novel up soon.﻿

sábado, 4 de mayo de 2013

"Self-Admiration"
by Karl Kraus [translated from the German by Helene Scher]
Austria, 1908
﻿
Since Tom from Wuthering Expectations has already sufficiently immortalized both Kraus' caustic aphorisms and his only half-translated but yet doubly apocalyptic play The Last Days of Mankind, I'd like to exit stage right from my formal participation in Karl Kraus Week with a quick look at Kraus' delirious self-encomium innocuously titled "Self-Admiration." Before we begin, though, I should probably admit that one of the questions that's been increasingly nagging me during my 33-page introduction to the Austrian wiseass this week--although one that I've been more or less assiduously avoiding anyway--is trying to determine where the slippery satirist ends and where the full-on real life nutjob begins. Is such a thing even possible to pinpoint? In his introduction to the Kraus et al. anthology that I've been using, Dirck Linck, while not exactly answering my question, at least gives me the comfort of knowing that even sage specialists have taken late Kraus' literary aims seriously within their particular regional and temporal contexts: "What Kraus, Broch, and Canetti present in their works is a symptomatology of the epochal violence that was clearing the ground for the terrors of National Socialism. It is no coincidence, therefore, that both Broch and Canetti backed up their literary works with significant theoretical reflections on mass psychology, jurisprudence, and politics, all aimed at the totalitarian disposition of the century" (x). "Self-Admiration," it will soon become clear, is an apolitical early work that has nothing to do with "the totalitarian disposition of the century" or anything like that although I do like the sound of the description enough to repeat it. That being said, can the five-page essay get us any closer to identifying where the artist ends and the con artist begins when it comes to Kraus' idiosyncratic aesthetic disposition? Ridiculously, I'm not really sure! Kraus begins his lively but problematic essay with two epigraphs, one from Schopenhauer and one--devilishly--from Kraus himself. The latter: "Self-admiration is permissible if the self is beautiful. It becomes an obligation if the reflecting mirror is a good one." Before the laughter has died down, Kraus assails the reader with yet another back-patting brick through the window in his opening sentence: "That I accept the reproach of self-admiration as the observation of a character trait well known to me and that I respond, not with contrition, but by continuing the provocation--this my readers should know by now" (19). In what follows, Kraus makes the argument--ironic perhaps but just how ironic?--that it's not wrong for him to be arrogant or vain given his talent level. "Viennese intellectuals ought to be grateful to me for having taken the trouble off their shoulders and preserved their reputation" he writes. "Whoever gladly dispenses with praise from the multitude, will not deny himself the chance to be his own partisan" he adds (ibid.). Lambasting the Viennese critics who "are hiding their respect for me, which grows greater by the day, behind the cowardly mask of convention," Kraus then drops two tasty autobiographical tidbits about how he and his one-man newspaper were apparently perceived by some in his early 20th century audience, claiming that "I am considered to be merely a watchdog for the corrupt machinations of a city" in one paragraph and that he is "an author who publishes his diary as a periodical" in another (20). If it's hard to know how much Kraus was joking at this remove in time, perhaps the question doesn't really matter all that much anyway. For it's hard not to like a writer who can conceive of his oeuvre as a diary and who will defend himself from the accusation from "riffraff" that "my preoccupation with myself, my position, my books, and my enemies" takes up half his "literary activity" when he himself readily admits, "it takes up all of my literary activity" (23). I, for one, am sorry that Karl Kraus Week has come to a close.

Source

Thanks again to Tom for inciting me to read the irrepressible crackpot Karl Kraus as part of Wuthering Expectations' The Austrian Literature Non-Challenge. Tom's final post this week, "Kraus the prophet - Don't ask why all this time I never spoke," pays a fitting tribute to Kraus' complexity with some melancholy reflections on what finally silenced "one of the few true satirists." "Self-Admiration" can be found on pages 19-23 of Dirck Linck, ed., Selected Short Writings: Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Robert Walser (New York & London: Continuum, 2006). Kraus: "The world considers it more important for someone not to regard his work as great than that it be great." Goethe, as quoted by Kraus: "Only good-for-nothings are modest" (22-23).﻿

miércoles, 1 de mayo de 2013

"Tourist Trips to Hell"
by Karl Kraus [translated from the German by Frederick Ungar]
Austria, 1920

"I didn't ask for sunshine, and I got World War III."

Sex Pistols, "Holidays in the Sun"﻿

If "The Cross of Honor," a homily on some of the idiocies of Austrian prostitution laws c. 1909, was a good example of a rather frisky and witty Karl Kraus, the later "Tourist Trips to Hell" is an excellent example of an altogether different Herr Kraus: angry, indignant, denunciatory...punk? Our hero, you see, wasn't much of a fan of World War I nor of the motley collection of culture-less entities variously gathered under the rubric of mankind. Two out of two ain't bad, eh? "I have in my hands a document that surpasses and seals the shame of this age, and would warrant assigning a place of honor in a cosmic boneyard to this money-hungry mess that calls itself mankind. If ever a newspaper clipping meant a clipping of creation--here we face the utter certainty that a generation to which such solicitations could be directed no longer has any better instincts to be violated" (4). The newspaper clipping in question, a two-page spread from the Basel, Switzerland rag Basler Nachrichten pimping "BATTLEFIELD EXCURSION TRIPS BY CAR!" in oversized type to woo just-post WWI vacationers to visit the battlefield at Verdun in order to understand "the quintessence of the horror of modern warfare" in between guided tours and sumptuous dining "with ample meals at first-rate restaurants" for the all-inclusive price of 117 Swiss francs (6-7), is an outrage that prompts Kraus to mock it in ad-like bullet points by comparing it to a sort of media version of Verdun in which "this most gruesome spectacle of bloody delirium through which the nations let themselves be dragged to no purpose whatsoever" pales in comparison with the "enormity" of the offending ad (4). Overkill? Not the way Kraus sings it, anticipating the Sex Pistols' formulation of "a cheap holiday in other people's misery" only sans jackboots and power chords. In any event, the following bullet points, all lifted from pages 5 and 8 of Kraus' broadside, will allow you to decide for yourself what a tourist trip to hell might look like:

You receive a newspaper in the morning.

You will learn that 1,500,000 bled to death exactly at the spot where wine and coffee--and everything else--are included.

You understand that all this came about so that some day, when nothing was left of the glory except moral bankruptcy, at least a battlefield par excellence would still be available.

You realize that what the competition can offer--the Argonne and Somme battles, the boneyards of Rheims and St. Mihiel--is a mere trifle compared with the first-class offering of the Basler Nachrichten. They will doubtless succeed to fatten their list of subscribers using the casualties of Verdun.

You realize that these nations have criminal laws to protect the life and even the honor of these press scoundrels who make a mockery of death and a profit out of catastrophe, and who particularly recommend this side trip to hell as an autumn special.

You will have unforgettable impressions of a world in which there is no single square centimeter not rutted by shells and advertisements.

And if, even then, you have not recognized that your very birth has brought you into a murderers' pit and that a mankind which profanes even the blood it shed is shot through and through with evil, and that there is no escaping it and no help--then the devil take you to a battlefield par excellence!